The Israeli douche is not describing a “conspiracy”, he’s describing public politics and public diplomacy. There is literally no conspiracy: it’s politicking. It’s coalition building, out in the open. Fascists are organising across borders. So why use the language of conspiracy? What’s with the cloak and dagger shit? The language of “admitting to conspiring”, what is it doing? It’s mystifying it, it’s adding an aura of “ooooh powerful people control shit behind the scenes”. What’s the point of that?

Of course antisemism and antizionism are not the same. That doesn’t mean that there don’t exist antisemitic ways of doing antizionist politics. Using the old tired tropes of conspiracy and behind the scenes control when it’s clearly public politics out in the open for all to see is an example of this.

And then let’s be super clear: what are you actually saying the Israeli apartheid regime did? If you’re attributing to them the coalition building among fascist parties, and then saying that the European fascists are better coordinated and more politically effective because of that coalition building, then yes that is a defensible thing to say (and you also don’t need “conspiracy” language to describe it).

But if you’re claiming that Israel somehow introduced fascism to parts of Europe where fascist politics would not have otherwise taken root, then that’s an extraordinary claim. If you’re claiming that Israel is “behind” the rise of fascist parties in Europe, that’s an extraordinary claim.

Note also the title of the thread: “Israel created and owns far right parties”. That’s blatantly conspiratorial language, that uses clearly antisemitic tropes. Again: it is possible to do anti-Zionist politics in an anti-Semitic way. Let’s not fucking do that. Let’s instead do anti-Zionist politics in an anti-fascist way.

And please don’t try to play the reverse uno card about quantification of the reasons behind fascism. Yes, we know where European fascism comes from and how these parties grew over the last 15 years. There is ample literature, and Israel is never described as the animating force of European fascism.

That’s an analysis based on vibes and what “sounds like it should be the case”. But the claim that the rise in fascist parties is not primarily and overwhelmingly so due to endogenous fascist, xenophobic and Islamophobic tendencies in European countries themselves but somehow the result of external propping up by some kind of Israeli conspiracy psyop does not stand to the simple Occam’s Razor test. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So give such evidence, buddy.

A much simpler explanation is that European and Israeli fascists have common cause. It really is that simple. Adding the extra variable that Israel somehow created European fascism assigns too much power to it and removes agency from Europeans, without explaining anything new that we already knew about the fascist phenomenon in Europe. And to be sure Israel never needed to create European fascist movements like some cartoonish anti-Semitic trope pulling strings in the background, Europeans happily created them on theie own.

We don’t need conspiratorial antisemitic tropes to condemn the genocidal Israeli apartheid regime. The evidence already in front of our eyes is enough… No reason to dumb down our analysis with some half baked rehashing of the protocols of the elders of Zion.

Mu-ti-ny! Mu-ti-ny! Mu-ti-ny!

And yet when Palestinians express hatred for Israelis it’s categorized as antisemitism.

Well now, subscribed!

I misinterpreted this phrase then, thinking you were addressing it to him:

Now go enjoy your £15 chippy tea and a nice swim at the sewage beach.

You’re directing this to a guy with dementia. That’s very silly.

The title misrepresents the content. The guy says they’ve created a network of alliances, not that they’ve created the parties. The European far right parties are not Israeli creations, they are offshoots of our own societies.

I already know how inflation works thanks 😁

What if instead you gave them Universal Basic Services? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_services

The war version of Zizek’s “my chatbot fucks your chatbot, we get sex out of the way and we can discuss philosophy”.

Chicken or pasta? Chicken.

Gary Stevenson’s got a theory about asset inflation driven by inequality.

In my opinion, in the long run, if they let this stand, this is a mistake. They should commute the punishment to life in prison. This is what the newly democratic Greek government did in 1975 with the fascists who overthrew democracy in 1967. By letting them rot in prison they never became martyrs and they slowly lost all credibility as relics of a violent past. Greek democracy is better for it, even though all stripes of the political Left at the time considered the commutation to be a betrayal to the victims of fascist repression. This is one of those (rare) cases where the Centre-Right was actually showing some wisdom.

Different contexts of course, and a key difference is that Assad is not held by the Syrian government, which is also yet to prove its democratic bona fides.

But there is something to be said about disavowing the slave master’s tools after taking over the slave master’s house. Syria will be a better place without the death penalty, even for vile criminals like Bashar al-Assad.

had some kind of heroic idea of themselves

You’re right. And our ruling class can probably point out to the absolute amount of money they spend on their foundations of choice to say they are even more charitable than the Victorians. Ugh.

In Victorian times fiction like Jules Verne’s novels and the like, rich yachtsmen saving the day is kind of a trope. What I’m trying to say is that the previous iteration of super rich fucks had some kind of heroic idea of themselves, some kind of noblesse oblige. These cunts are just cunts.

I think we’ve reached a fix point and just circling an irreducible disagreement. I guess the theoretical question (to which I have no answer) would be “at what point does a large peripheral power cross the threshold to becoming a small imperialist?”.

I am also profoundly in disagreement with your “total global hegemony” category, because to me that looks like replacing an abstract category (imperialism) with a concrete (US/NATO) which at this point gets us into Marxist metaphysics.

But I’ll leave it at that because I have other things to do. Maybe you’re right and revisiting Lenin should be one of those. At any rate thanks for an engaging discussion that went way above the idiotic mudslinging that I was responding to.

But you are factually wrong! Pre-war, Russia indeed had a peripheral hegemony of countries it was exploiting to feed its economy. It was growing. That peripheral hegemony is now weakened, eg., when Russia was unable to protect its assets in Armenia, but that’s precisely because it played the imperial antagonism game. It’s now a losing imperialist, not an anti-imperial power.

Edit:

And for goodness sake, what is this aberration?

Russia is accelerating the decline in imperialism.

Imperialism is a system. If US imperialism loses, that means a different element of the system wins. That doesn’t mean socialism, it means reconfiguration.

At what point did “total international domination” become the threshold for imperialism? The inequality of imperialist powers is why we have imperialist antagonism in the first place. Or are you claiming we have transcended imperialism itself??

And maybe I’m not a guru of Leninism but the fusion of banking with industrial capital was already happening in Russia, with things like Gazprombank.

Basically, I don’t understand why small imperialists get to be labelled non imperialist.